Kevin Duffy: Has your anger with Edsall changed to anger with UConn?

Published 4:57 pm, Saturday, September 7, 2013

You're supposed to be angry next Saturday. That's been the plan for 2ï»¿1/2 years, hasn't it?

Forty-thousand synchronized boos and one long-awaited home triumph over Maryland that'll mark the beginning of the end for Randy Edsall. For all you riled-up UConn fans, this is supposed to be Hate-on-Edsall week. Beating him in College Park wasn't good enough. No, for almost three years, you've been waiting to see Randy Edsall go down at The Rent.

But let me ask: Are you actually still angry about his departure?

Or has your hostility toward Edsall shifted to hostility toward everything that's happened since he left?

Because, in case you've forgotten, when he left, UConn had just lost in the Fiesta Bowl. When he returns, UConn will be two weeks removed from the horror show that was the Towson game.

Oof. I reminded you of Towson. Now I bet you're angry.

And you know what? You've got the right to be. Anyone with an emotional investment should be furious (hence, all the booing last Thursday).

That night in East Hartford, amid the boos, there were two guys with emotional investments that go far beyond those of the disgruntled fans: Rob Lunn and Glen Mourning, both of whom played for Edsall at UConn, were in attendance.

These days, Lunn sells medical devices in Boston. Mourning teaches fourth and fifth grade in Hartford. Neither was an outstanding player: Lunn a solid defensive tackle, and Mourning, constantly injured, a safety, both with UConn through 2008. Both are highly articulate -- Lunn gained fame for his witty "Fat White Guy" blog, and Mourning, from Danbury, has been writing a book about his college experience. Both are extremely honest. They're probably the two most honest UConn athletes I've covered.

By that, I mean neither gives stock answers. They know football, know how to analyze it and know how to separate emotion and bias from their analysis. So they're more than qualified to assess UConn's nosedive from promising to pitiful.

"There was a moxie, an attitude with Edsall," Mourning said. "With these guys, I don't know."

"When you're not pulling top-100 talent all the time, it helps to walk around with a chip on your shoulder," Lunn said. "I'm not sure that culture exists today in the locker room."

Last Thursday, Mourning saw a group that looked smaller and slower than what he remembered. Lunn actually thought the offensive line looked "much more athletic" than it was under Edsall, but not as cohesive. He saw a defense that "lacked attitude" and, sometimes, didn't play with "defined roles."

Generally, they've seen a culture change.

"That Edsall group with (linebackers coach) Lyndon Johnson, (running backs coach) Terry Richardson, (defensive coordinator) Todd Orlando, even (offensive coordinator) Rob Ambrose, that was a family and the kids fed off of that," Mourning said. "I can't say that Sio Moore and Dwayne Gratz gave me that vibe. It was more like they were trying to hold on and graduate."

Lunn's take: "Say what you want about Edsall, but the program was his top-to-bottom. He put his stamp on it. Whether you liked his quote-unquote `vanilla offense,' whether you liked the defensive style of Todd Orlando and Hank Hughes, we won games, we produced and we very rarely ever lost a home game. And I wish we had that kind of leadership now."

Let him explain.

"There was a void to fill in the Big East and we didn't fill it," Lunn said. "To see where the program is now, I don't think coach Pasqualoni is a bad coach, I'm just not sure that the guys on today's team view the opportunity to play like we did. We had the culture that we were the underdogs. We were the only team in America that could say, `We know we can do it because we've done it before, but also no one believes in us.'"

Let him explain some more.

"I grew up in the shadow of Paul Pasqualoni, OK? I grew up in Rochester," Lunn said. "(At Syracuse) he recruited me out of high school with coach (George) DeLeone. For a long time, I thought very highly of coach Pasqualoni, but I wanted to see a coach come in who was going to take UConn and (continue) a standard that had been set from coach Edsall and guys from the (Dan) Orlovsky era and guys like Scott Lutrus, Danny Lansanah, Cody Brown, Darius Butler, Tyvon Branch, Julius Williams, Jordan Todman, Donald Brown. These guys built something there."

Mourning's take: "It goes back to hoping that (UConn) was going to find some cool young 38-year-old to come in and have all these ties to the South and handpick the kids from the north and keep this thing going."

They both wonder how it got to this point, the two of them watching Towson walk all over their Huskies, a crowd booing its own team the way it's supposed to boo its old coach.

That's how it would have happened last season, at least. If Maryland came to The Rent in 2012, Edsall wouldn't have heard the end of it. The wound from his sneaky exit was still fresh; the optimism surrounding UConn was still high. But the energy and hopefulness and, really, the patience have been sucked out of this fan base.

And it makes me think: Nothing can change the way Randy Edsall bolted from UConn, but can the Huskies' regression change the way he's perceived?

Let your ears be the judge Saturday.

Because when Randy Edsall returns to The Rent, you're going to hear boos. They just might not be directed at him.